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Great Garages: Autoweek visits Carl George's vintage racing haven

November 4, 2012

Hang around road-race courses during vintage weekends in the Southeast long enough, and you'll run into half a dozen guys in MGAs and Minis, part of a group known as Zapata Racing. This team of British car nuts includes expert driver Phil Wicks (he drove the red Mini in the original 1969 film The Italian Job), top songwriter and music exec David Conrad, and Carl George, who in March 2008 had a giant idea.

George had just retired from the medical-technology industry and wanted to spend a lot more time vintage racing, something he'd been doing for the past 25 years. His idea was to create a place for his friends to keep their race cars, parts cars, tow vehicles, motor homes and any other cars they bought just for fun.

So George, now 69, designed and built a 20,000-square-foot, 60-plus-car garage, along with 14 spaces for tow vehicles and motor homes under 60-foot-deep awnings. He had been renting 4,000 square feet of space for six years in a suburban Nashville, Tenn.-based warehouse, then bought the empty lot next door to build his dream garage.

Today, he uses 12,000 square feet of space for his race and street cars, for Zapata Racing' s cars and tow vehicles, and for friends in the local Porsche, Mercedes and British car clubs who rent space.

Almost by accident, George' s place—known simply as “the garage”—has become a private museum. Car clubs host parties here and show off their goods. The garage has a front office, a second-floor meeting room with kitchen and lounge, and glass walls through which guests can look down on all the cars. George is putting in a library for all his and his friends' car books, and the walls are filling up with purchasable car art.

From the 1950s to 1982, George' s father ran a Gulf and Texaco service station in Nashville. “I'm not mechanical: I can do oil changes—that' s about it,” George says. But he grew to like the look of the pumps, signs, tools and petroliana from the family station.

Many original pieces decorate the place and give it a museum look, along with celebrity cars he' s collected: His Porsche Speedster was used in the 2011 Mistletoe video by junior warbler Justin Bieber. “They made snow for the video, so we had to put the top up, which I thought was a little funny.” His '97 Aston Martin DB7—”It' s not as nimble as I like”—has about 40,000 miles on it, with 1,800 put on by first owner and car nut Nicolas Cage.

George' s garage is part museum, part store, part storage lot, but all hangout.

This article originally appeared in the Oct. 29, 2012 issue of Autoweek. To get Autoweek delivered to your door biweekly, click here.